Tiimiakatemia® Method

Tiimiakatemia® Method

The world has changed a lot during the recent decades. We’ve moved away from stable industrial production to global, ever-changing knowledge work. This poses a challenging question to educators, leaders and human resource experts: how do we educate and train students and our workers in the world of knowledge? The solution is team coaching.

Tiimiakatemia® Method is an education and development method that aims to create teampreneurs. They are entrepreneurs who are knowledge workers. They have the competencies and attitudes to work in teams of other knowledge workers. The Method provides roboust, tested and flexible way of getting people to train their knowledge workers’ competencies.

The Method has been used for over 20 years both in management and entrepreneurship education. It has users in over 15 countries. They come from all walks of life: teachers, trainers, students, managers, hub leaders and entrepreneurs. And all of them are team coaching professionals.

Practical Cocktail

Tiimiakatemia® Method is a multifaceted cocktail. It combines entrepreneurship, business, teamwork, pedagogical approaches and humanistic thinking together. These fields have been refined to fit both education and business environments where teamwork and shared results are critical requirements.

At the heart of the Method is socioconstructivism. In this approach the learner constructs his or her own thoughts, ideas and attitudes with others. Because an individual cannot learn entrepreneurship in a vacuum or within the constraints of a conventional classroom, the Method emphasises learning by doing. By doing real-life projects and assingments the individual can gain valuable experiences. These experiences are shared with others in team learning settings.

Tiimiakatemia® Method has been modelled and described in many ways. The inventor and main developer of the Method, Opetusneuvos (Counselor of Education) Johannes Partanen, has described it by writing articles and books about the Method’s central tools and processes. Also, other professionals who use Tiimiakatemia® Method have written their own books about it.

Unique Practices and Tools

Although Tiimiakatemia® Method is unique, it has taken influences from management and innovation books. The influences have been developed into practices and tools that have been tested both with university students and professionals from working life. Thus, the Method is not a copy of something, but a unique concept where different parts form a whole.

The main framework of the Method composes of three processes: team learning, learning by doing and theory program. In addition, several learning tools are used to support these processes. These learning tools include such tools as “learning contract”, “learning diary”, “learning cells” and “competency model”. In different environments these tools are supplemented with the environment’s own tools.

The inventor of Tiimiakatemia® Method Mr. Partanen has been given the title of Opetusneuvos (Counselor of Education) by the President of Finland Mrs. Tarja Halonen for his life-work as an promoter of entrepreneurship and inventor of Tiimiakatemia.

World-Class Results in Creating Entrepreneurship

There are 10.000 users of Tiimiakatemia® Method in the world who use the Methods in their own contexts and in their own ways.

By deploying Tiimiakatemia® Method, universities have been able to increase their rate of their students on becoming entrepreneurs right after graduation by ten-fold. Secondary level vocational school have used the Method to create entrepreneurial culture to areas of craft where entrepreneurship is the only choice of getting employed after graduation. In primary scools the teachers have been able to increase communal learning in schools and fulfil the nation-wide requirements of new Finnish curriculums.

Numerous learners have discovered the joy of learning and become entrepreneurs by using the method. Those learners who are in working life have developed their managerial skills and have been able to build and lead teams in success.